Revolutionary action more often than not was a theatrical concession to the desires of violently discontented masses rather than an actual battle for power.
HANNAH ARENDTFor abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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The last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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What are we “doing” when we do nothing but think? Where are we when we, normally always surrounded by our fellow men, are together with no one but ourselves?
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In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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Evil, as she saw it, need not be committed only by demonic monsters but—with disastrous effect—by morons and imbeciles as well, especially if, as we see in our own day, their deeds are sanctioned by religious authority.
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Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself.
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Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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Justice insists on the importance of Adolf Eichmann… On trial are his deeds, not the sufferings of the Jews, not the German people or mankind, not even anti-Semitism and racism.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
HANNAH ARENDT